Dividend Tax Credit Glitch at CRA

CRA has had a computer glitch that could affect any BC resident taxpayers with dividend income. Their system has been disallowing the BC portion of the Dividend Tax Credit. Their notices simply say that “We changed your British Columbia dividend tax credit to $0.00. This tax credit is a percentage of the taxable amount of dividends from taxable Canadian corporations.” If your notice of assessment shows a different balance owing or refund amount than what was filed, look in the paragraph below the numbers on the notice for an explanation.

CRA has advised that the error has been corrected and should not be a problem going forward. Additionally, there official position is that they will be “… identifying and correcting affected returns…” A time frame for these corrections to be reassessed was not made available. They did state that filing an adjustment request would not necessarily speed up the process.